God
God is the greatest conceivable being (or the most perfect being). Concepts of God Anselmian Concept What Anselm said is that God is the greatest conceivable being. He said God is aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit – that than which a greater cannot be conceived; or more simply put, the greatest conceivable being. This is the Anselmian concept of God. God is the greatest conceivable being. If one could think of something greater than ‘God,’ then that would be God! So by the very concept of who God is, He must be the greatest being conceivable, or that is not really God. It is some lesser thing. Perfect Being Theology The concept of God enunciated by St. Anselm as the greatest conceivable being (or the most perfect being) has guided theological reflection upon the raw data of Scripture so that God’s biblical attributes are to be conceived in the greatest possible way – in a way that would serve to exalt God’s greatness. So when the Bible says, for example, that God is all-powerful or that God is all knowing, this attribute should be taken to the greatest possible degree that is coherent – to say God is omnipotent and omniscient and to construe these attributes in ways that would exalt God’s greatness. Since the concept of God is underdetermined by biblical data – that is to say, the biblical data do not always make it clear how one is to understand God’s attributes – and since what constitutes a great-making property is to a degree debatable, theologians and philosophers who work within the Judeo-Christian tradition have a considerable latitude in formulating a philosophically coherent and biblical faithful doctrine of God. To give just one example of this, the Bible affirms clearly that God is eternal, but it does not make clear whether this means that God is infinite throughout all time or whether God transcends time all together. The biblical data is underdeterminitive with respect to how one grasps or understands divine eternity. It is not clear whether it is greater to be timeless or to be infinite throughout all time. This is a matter of debate among philosophers and theologians. So this would be one example of where Christian theologians and philosophers have differed in their doctrine of God. They all affirm the core doctrine that God is eternal but some will maintain that God is atemporal (that is, He exists beyond time), others will say, no, God is omnitemporal and exists throughout infinite time. Both of these would be acceptable as Judeo-Christian doctrines of divine eternity. Biblical Revelation God is, on the one hand, an infinite being. On the other hand, God is also a personal being. The God of the Bible is the infinite-personal being. This is in contrast to the gods of many other religions in the world, including those of Greco-Roman mythology and Eastern pantheism like Hinduism and Taoism. What the Bible says is that God is both infinite and personal. Insofar as God is infinite, there is a great chasm that separates Him from everything else in all creation including man, animals, and inanimate life. God stands alone as the infinite being. On the other hand, insofar as God is personal, man (as made in the image of God) finds himself on God’s side of the chasm that separates him from all of the rest of creation which are not persons. So the concept of God in Judaism and Christianity is a God who is infinite (and therefore unlike all the rest of creation) and yet who is also personal (and therefore can be known in a personal way). God is in the beginning and then he brought everything else into being by a free act of creation. God’s relationship to the world is more like the artist and the painting or the sculpture that he creates. So the Judeo-Christian view is very different from the pantheistic or panentheistic worlds which say the world is part of god. Greco-Roman Mythology The gods of Greco-Roman mythology were personal beings, but they were not infinite. Eastern Pantheism The god of Eastern pantheism like Hinduism and Taoism is infinite but this concept of god is not personal. The world is a part of god, and god is not distinct from creation. God did not bring everything else into being. Cannot Be Known A common view in the modern culture is that there is nothing known about God. If God does exist, you can not say anything about what He is like. In this view, God is just a sort of nebulous force or something of that sort, not something that can really be described. Criticism Critics argue that in reality such an entity would be a non-being. Anything that exists in reality has attributes or properties that make it what it is and to describe it. So a God that literally had no attributes or properties would be non-existent. Anything that exists has certain properties or attributes. The 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach expressed this point when he wrote: A being without qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind; and such a being is virtually non-existent. Where man deprives God of all qualities, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. To the truly religious man, God is not a being without qualities, because to him he is a positive, real being. The theory that God cannot be defined, and consequently cannot be known by man, is therefore the offspring of recent times, a product of modern unbelief. . . . On the ground that God is unknowable, man excuses himself . . for his forgetfulness of God, his absorption in the world: he denies God practically by his conduct, – the world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations, – but he does not deny him God theoretically, he does not attack his existence; he lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or incommode him; it is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence, a self-contradictory existence, – a state of being, which, as to its effects, is not distinguishable from non-being. . . . The alleged religious horror of limiting God by positive predicates is only the irreligious wish to know nothing more of God, to banish God from the mind.''Ludwig Feuerbach, ''The Essence of Christianity, 1841 Attributes Anything that exists in reality must have attributes or properties that make it what it is and to describe it. The Westminster Shorter Catechism describes God in the following terms: “a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” The attributes of God are His in virtue of being an infinite being, and there are also those attributes of God which are His in virtue of His being a personal being. In one sense this distinction is artificial because God has all of His attributes to an infinite degree, but nevertheless He has certain attributes which are not His in virtue of His being personal. Many people do not have trouble conceiving of God as an infinite being. That seems intuitively correct. But many people have trouble thinking that God can be both infinite and personal. They seem to think that somehow personhood excludes infinity – that God cannot be personal if he is also infinite. That is simply an unjustified assumption. God possesses all of the attributes of personhood that people do, whether these are intellectual attributes, emotional attributes, volitional attributes. But he possesses them to an infinite degree whereas people have them only to a finite degree. In that sense these attributes are communicable. They can be shared by both God and man to different degrees. Thus man is a person fundamentally because God is personal. It is because who God is that people are also persons. God is not only infinite, self-existent, eternal, omnipresent, and immutable, but he is also personal, omniscient, omnipotent, holy, and loving. Before the creation of the world, when God alone existed, God knew and planned to take on human flesh and to enter human history as a man for people’s sake and for human salvation. And he did this because he loves people so much and would do this to win themselves to him. The infinite God loves people that much. Infinite Attributes * Self-existence (Aseity) * Eternity * Necessity * Omnipresence * Immutability Personal Attributes *Incorporeality *Intellectual Attribute **Omniscience *Volitional Attribute **Omnipotence *Moral Attributes **Holiness **Love References Category:Doctrine of God